Data Engineer I

At Booking.com, data drives our decisions. Technology is at our core. And innovation is everywhere. Through our products, partners and people, we make it easier for everyone to experience the world.

Role Description

About the team:

The PPC team builds and optimizes large-scale ML models for online bidding across all major search providers, owning one of the industry’s largest performance and auction strategies to keep Booking.com competitive. We run end-to-end research-to-production cycles—from POCs and modeling to large-scale A/B testing—driving measurable impact by optimizing auction levers at scale.

We are a group of ML scientists, ML engineers, Data scientists and Data engineers who work closely together and collaborate with business stakeholders to build new solutions for PPC. We value innovation, ownership and a results-driven attitude.

As a Data Engineer I in PPC Bidding ML

You will help build and maintain the data foundations that power bidding models, reporting, monitoring and operational decision-making across our PPC ecosystem. You will work on scalable ingestion and transformation pipelines, improve the reliability of data processing services, and help enable faster, better data-driven decisions.

You bring solid engineering fundamentals together with an analytics mindset. Beyond moving data, you will help shape data so it is trusted, well-modeled and meaningful for downstream users.

Key Job Responsibilities and Duties

• Build, maintain and improve data pipelines and transformations that support bidding models, reporting, experimentation and operational workflows.
• Support efficient and scalable data ingestion solutions that enable timely and reliable data-driven decision-making.
• Connect, model and prepare datasets from different systems to create trusted and usable data products for machine learning and business use cases.
• Help ensure data quality and standardisation by following agreed design patterns, engineering best practices and data governance principles.
• Monitor system health, relevant SLIs and SLOs, and proactively identify bottlenecks, risks and failure points.
• Participate in incident handling, mitigation and follow-up, using learnings from production issues to improve system resilience.
• Write readable, reusable and maintainable code and continuously develop your craft in data engineering and related technologies.

Role Qualifications and Requirements

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science or a related field.
• 1–3 years of relevant experience in data engineering, analytics engineering or a related field.
• Hands-on exposure to a server-side programming language such as Python, Java, Scala or similar.
• Entry-level experience building data pipelines and transformations at scale.
• Foundational knowledge of SQL and distributed data processing concepts.
• Understanding of data modeling, data quality concepts, and how to structure data so it is reliable and useful for analytics and decision-making.
• Familiarity with modern cloud-based data platforms, orchestration tools and streaming or batch processing technologies.
• Strong written and spoken English communication skills.
• A learning mindset and interest in continuously improving your engineering craft.

Benefits & Perks - Global Impact, Personal Relevance:

Booking.com’s Total Rewards Philosophy is not only about compensation but also about benefits. We offer a competitive compensation and benefits package, as well as unique-to-Booking.com benefits which include:

• Annual paid time off and generous paid leave scheme including: parent, grandparent, bereavement, and care leave
• Hybrid working including flexible working arrangements, and up to 20 days per year working from abroad (home country)
• Industry leading product discounts - up to 1400 per year - for yourself, including automatic Genius Level 3 status and Booking.com wallet credit